For Immediate Release

NEWS

DAR Museum Quilts Featured in Online Quilt Index

DAR Museum Quilts Featured in Online Quilt Index

ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA and EAST LANSING, MICHIGAN - The Quilt Index (http://www.quiltindex.org/search_results.php?collection=DAR), a database created through a partnership between The Alliance for American Quilts and Michigan State University announces the addition of 292 quilts from the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, DC.

Nearly 100 of these stunning and important quilts were made before 1850, including a fabulous circa 1835 counterpane, Mariner’s Compass and Chips and Whetstones, (http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?pbd=dar-a0a1g7-a). Made by Mary Tayloe Lloyd Key, this piece has come to be called the “Francis Scott Key Family Quilt,” after her famous husband, who wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.” This stunning quilt shows that Mary was clearly an artist in her own right.

Also coming soon in this phase will be quilts from the Museum of the American Quilter's Society; the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum; the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries; and the Winedale Center for the Quilt at the Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. This phase will expand the Quilt Index to more than 15,000 quilts and the associated documentation available for searches across the collections for patterns, individual quiltmakers, themes, techniques, and many other characteristics. Moreover, it will result in a model for repositories--of any size and anywhere in the world--to make thematic collections of any kind more accessible and useful for education and research.

This expansion of the Quilt Index was supported by a National Leadership Grant for Library Museum Collaborations from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Tradition meets technology

The Quilt Index idea was incubated by The Alliance for American Quilts, a nonprofit organization comprised of a broad range of key scholars, curators, librarians, and quilt artists in the U.S. dedicated to the study, preservation, and sharing of American quilt history. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Index was developed and piloted by MATRIX and the Michigan State University Museum, in partnership with The Alliance and three national partners with significant repositories of state quilt documentation data.

The Quilt Index merges tradition with technology and springs from the work of a unique team of researchers and experts who are committed to making significant, quilt-related data accessible for research and teaching as well as developing replicable applications of technology in the humanities. Already the pilot phase of the Quilt Index has resulted in material that services the collection management needs of individual repositories and, at the same time, makes their collections accessible to users worldwide.

Principal Quilt Index partners

The Alliance for American Quilts, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1993 and now headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina supports and develops projects to document, preserve, and share the history and stories of quilts and quiltmakers. The Alliance brings together institutions and individuals from the creative, scholarly and business worlds of quiltmaking to advance the recognition of quilts in American culture. For more information, visit www.centerforthequilt.org or contact Amy Milne at 828-251-7073.

Michigan State University Museum, the state’s natural and cultural history museum, is home of the Great Lakes Quilt Center. The museum has a long history of engagement in research, education, exhibitions and service projects related to quilts, and holds a collection of more than 500 quilts, quilt-related ephemera and documentation. For more information, visit http://www.museum.msu.edu or contact Marsha MacDowell, (517) 355-2370 (tel); macdowell@msu.edu.

MATRIX - The Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences at Michigan State University is devoted to the application of new technologies in humanities and social science teaching and research. It creates and maintains online resources, provides training in computing and new teaching technologies and creates forums for the exchange of ideas and expertise in new teaching technologies. For more information, visit http://www.matrix.msu.edu. or contact Professor Mark Kornbluh, (517) 355-9300 (tel); (517) 355-8363 (fax); mark@mail.matrix.msu.edu.

The DAR Museum was founded in 1890, concurrent with its parent organization, the National Society Daughters of the Revolution. The DAR was one of many historical and genealogical societies founded in the years following the nation’s centennial in 1876. The DAR Museum collects quilts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The collection is particularly strong in early quilts and counterpanes, including wholecloth, framed medallion, and whitework bedcoverings dating from the late eighteenth century through the first decades of the 1800s.